บททั้งหมดของ My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian : บทที่ 311 - บทที่ 320

JaceThe corridor he took me down got narrower and colder the further we went. I have learned over a long, careful life to pay attention when a powerful man walks you somewhere quiet.He didn't talk on the way. The arm I'd laid across his shoulders had come off somewhere around the second turn, naturally, the moment its work was done. Now he was a step ahead of me, a wall of a man moving through his own house, and I followed, because the only thing worse than following him would have been making him ask twice. The torches got fewer. The noise of the hall fell off behind us until it was a rumor of itself. I counted the doors we passed, the turns we took, the same as I count everything, because a man who knows the way out is never quite as trapped as he looks.We stopped at a door at the end of it. He opened it himself and stood aside and waited for me to go in first, which is not a courtesy. You put a man in a room ahead of you when you want to be the one between him and the door.I w

JaceI still couldn't work out why Mina kept going down to the kitchens.She was gone before I woke, second morning in a row, off to work with the cooks and the pot-scrubbers. She didn't have to be. She was the Alpha's sister, half his blood anyway. One word from her and she'd never lift a finger in this place again. But down she went, every morning, and came back smelling of smoke and bread with flour up her sleeves, happy in a way I didn't poke at.The omega thing was the half that wasn't Fenris's. Her mother was a slave brought up out of the south, and in the North that travels straight down the blood. Nothing washes it out, not even an Alpha for a brother. So she got both at once. The protection and the stain. I'd watched it follow her around the keep, the small ways people stood a half-step off her, careful, the respect that stopped a hair short of real. None of them did it to her face. Nobody up here was dumb enough to slight the Alpha's blood where the Alpha might hear about it

Jace"The warrior isn't happy you beat him."I didn't hurry to face her. I finished counting the gold off my palm into the purse, took my time about it, and only then turned around. Sera stood a few feet off in furs too good for a morning walk to a sparring yard, breath showing white in the cold. Behind her, two soldiers were carrying the tall fighter off between them, her feet dragging furrows in the snow, blood gone black down her chin. Nobody in the yard was watching that anymore. They were watching Sera, and through her, me."Good morning, my Luna."She laughed, short and real. "I'm not your Luna.""No?""If you were from around here, I would be. You're not." She tilted her head. "So I'm nobody's Luna to you.""Mina's mine," I said. "That's close enough to family. I'll call you what I like."That got the laugh out of her again, smaller this time. Then it was gone, and she was studying me, which was what she'd come down here to do."Did you watch the whole thing?" I said."I watched

JaceSera went still.She stared at me like I had said something so ridiculous that it was taking a while for it to make sense.I watched it land on her.Then she started to laugh.Not a small one. She threw her head back, both hands dropped to her knees, and she laughed at me, loud, out in the open yard, bent over with it, her shoulders shaking violently.Around us the warriors turned to look. Their Luna, folded in half and howling at the southerner in the snow. A couple of them came half off the fence, unsure whether something had gone wrong with her. Nothing had gone wrong with her. She was the only one in that yard having a good morning.I stood there and let her have it. Then I pushed a slightly frustrated breath out through my nose and waited.Let me stop it there a second because I want to be fair to her, and fair means admitting she had a point.What I'd asked for was insane. I know it. A man with no blood, no claim, no pack, no name anybody up here had heard a week ago, stand

IrinaI stood at the vanity and watched my hands move. They were steady. That was the part that didn't fit the rest of the morning. My fingers picked up the silver brush, worked it through the ends of my hair, and set it back down in the exact center of the silk runner without a single tremor. Outside the window, the sun was hitting the white stone of the courtyard, flat and bright and indifferent to the fact that I had not slept for more than an hour at a stretch in three weeks.The room smelled of lemon oil and the lavender water the maids had brought up at dawn. It was a clean smell. A southern smell. It was supposed to be the scent of safety, the smell of a house where the rules were written in ink instead of blood. But underneath the lavender, tucked into the heavy velvet of the curtains and the deep pile of the rug, I could still catch the ghost of the North. It was a sharp, metallic note that stayed at the back of my throat, reminding me that the walls of this palace were thinn